


The Light of the Body Is the Eye

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Body Horror, Episode AU: s03e13 Last of the Time Lords, Episode: s03e13 Last of the Time Lords, M/M, Sort Of, The Valiant (Doctor Who), and some screaming, blood on white shirts, fingers in bullet wounds, messed up scary Ten is messed up and appalling, oh also the Doctor cries, regeneration chicken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 00:41:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21844054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: The Master refuses to regenerate. The Doctor tries to make the wound hurt worse, trying to disrupt the Master‘s concentration, tomakethe regeneration happen.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/The Master (Simm), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 103





	The Light of the Body Is the Eye

This footage doesn’t exist. Even the Black Archive, with its extensive scavenged expertise, doesn’t have the means to maintain the time lock necessary for preservation of the magnetic tape on which it was recorded. 

Nonetheless— There are bigger archives. More sophisticated ones. Ones with the technology and the collections policy to support it. 

This footage doesn’t exist. That it was recorded at all, on grainy and ephemeral primitive media, was never intended, but the work of a cameraman with surprising dedication. Or more likely, in the tumult of his world rewinding its extinction year, he forgot about the blinking red indicator. 

The gunshot blows out the sound levels, briefly. When it comes back, the Doctor has already made his dash across the deck. The Master is already staggering, suddenly unsteady on the polished hardwood beneath his smooth-soled shoes. The Doctor’s hands reach; he catches the Master as his feet fold beneath him; they sink to the floor. 

This Doctor’s not made for cradling. He’s all bones and movement. Still, he holds the Master, his arm across his back, one hand on a shoulder and another around the shuddering ribs. His whole body is curled into what support it can provide. 

“I’ve got you,” he says. Except he hasn’t. 

The sound quality of the recording is poor (this is not the fault of the beleaguered audiovisual team, brought to the Valiant for the first contact broadcast and used intermittently by the Master for public service announcements, ultimatums, tantrums, bait, cryptic communications, and music videos, none of which required the sort of intimate close-up work of the current pathos). Not every word comes through. Mostly, what has made it onto the tape is the Doctor’s increasingly fraught side of the exchange, but it’s more than enough to get the gist across. 

_You’re not dying._

_Don’t be stupid._

_It’s only a bullet._

The Doctor is back to his scarecrow self, but the Master, even in his spindly arms, seems smaller than usual, sprawled messily on the floor, his legs trying and not really succeeding at propping him up or making him look dignified. His suit jacket is slipping at the flank. His shirt is almost about to come untucked. His tie is loose—an intentional nod to thuggish insouciance earlier, but now part of his new, vulnerable look. 

It’s the clammy sweat all across his skin. It’s the tension in his shoulders and the weakness in his core. It’s the determined suppression: of pain, of reflex, of the one overwhelming thing his body thinks it should do, as soon as possible, never mind who is holding him and what that person has threatened to do to him if he survives. 

“One little bullet—Come _on_.”

With no zoom, it’s difficult to see in the video: is the Master’s jaw tight? Does his mouth quiver when he pulls his lips together? Does he stifle his suffering and refuse to acknowledge that it’s costing him anything to do so; does he smile when he denies the Doctor, his initial laboured grimace smoothing into purpose?

The Doctor is pleading, his brow all furrow, his teeth showing. 

“Regenerate,” he says. “Just regenerate.”

“Please,” he says. Then he’s shouting it. 

Finally, the microphone picks up the Master’s voice. “And spend...the rest of my life imprisoned with _you_?” His eyes widen. It might be a taunt or it might be real incredulity. 

The Doctor’s breath fills the break. It’s the moment he comes to believe that this is for real. It’s clear in the image as the realisation transforms his face. This is also when he begins to rock, cajoling, begging, the things he’s saying inaudible or incomprehensible or only for the Master to hear. 

He’s crying. Invisible to the camera, but not to the viewer, there are tears, desperate, violent tears, the tears of a patience not rewarded, the tears of a grief for so much more than this: for the injury of the past year; for their world, a little piece of which he’d thought he was recovering; for the shock of an impossible loss; for frustration, most of all, for himself. 

“ _Regenerate!_ ”

At this point, it’s unmistakeable, the Master’s grin. His pleasure in the Doctor’s upset so far outweighs the outraged demands of his damaged body that the hurt appears bearable, manageable. Just. It radiates through him. He pushes it down, down again, down. But he’s strained with the effort, both of denying the regeneration and of hiding how difficult it is to deny it. It isn’t enough to control his death. Here, in the Doctor’s arms, he has to control what the Doctor sees of it, too. 

He swallows the half a grunt that makes it to the surface. But he’s stiffening, rigid, shaking low in his body where only the Doctor can feel it, passing into him and into his distress. The Doctor risks looking away from the Master’s face to glance again at the dark circle where the bullet went in, the gash in the perfectly white shirt looking more like a burn than a puncture, even the wound polite, contained, understating the forces at unseen, silent war inside him. 

Blood, there should be blood. 

_This_ realisation plays itself out on the Doctor’s face as well. He stops listening; his eyes go away for a second, his thoughts on the possibility that’s just opened itself up to him. On blood. On the enormous concentration, taxing even the Master, required to reject regeneration outright. 

One little bullet… One little bullet hole. One momentary lapse of the mind.

The Doctor puts his palm, almost gently, onto the point of entry on the Master’s gut. He pushes down. 

The Master doesn’t cry out, quite, but his whole body jerks. His eyes widen again, this time in shock, astonishment, the whites of his eyes flashing as he seeks out the Doctor’s gaze, as though, until he has it, his incredulity will have nowhere to land. 

The Doctor swallows. He pushes harder. This is working. 

The Master’s mouth is opening and closing soundlessly. The veins in his temple bulge, and his chest heaves. His legs kick out, useless, flailing. 

“You’re not going anywhere,” the Doctor says, still holding him close. 

He’s called the Master’s attention back to the present, back to his body, to the pain that he could so easily relieve, but it’s not enough. It isn’t that he needs to hear the Master voice it. It isn’t that he needs the Master to admit that he can’t hold out. It isn’t that he needs to hear the Master scream. He just needs—he wants—to know that this is as bad for the Master as it is for him, that it isn’t the easy, casual and laughing contest he’s framed it as.

But what he really needs to know is that he’s winning it after all. 

He’s worked so hard, put up with all sorts of things he shouldn’t have. He’s wanted so _much_. 

He prods at the bullet hole, probing the edges with his fingertips. Pay attention. Stay with me. Let your body feel it; let it do what it can do. No more resistance.

“What,” the Master asks between gasps, “are you doing?”

“I’m keeping you safe.”

He presses into the Master’s flesh. He works into it with a prying, merciless insistence. _Come on_ , his expression of grim absorption is saying, _regenerate. I’m not bothering to ask nicely anymore_.

The Master does scream. Not loudly, not for long. The picture jumps. Someone’s startlement jostling the camera. 

There’s blood now, soaking crisp, white cotton, running up the fibre of the weave, like the body’s acknowledgement on behalf of its inhabitant. Yes, this is agony. Yes, I’m here. No, no amount of stubborn self discipline can take me away from you. 

And _there_ , finally, it starts, the remaking fire, flowing hot and hesitant into the hole with the Doctor’s fingers in it, the energy that will keep his cells alive while they reassemble themselves, the impetus that reorganises them, makes them forget the harm that was done to them and allows the busy processes of living to continue in spite of it. It's following the Master’s blood, trying to recall and reprogram even those smallest parts of him that have been spilled from him. 

It’s just a glow between their bodies, barely visible, blocked by the angle of the way they’re arranged on the floor. Then the Doctor shifts, and the fire shines clear, a light in a tunnel swirling with heat distortion, reaching into the world. It surrounds the Doctor’s fingers, still inside the Master, not forgotten, not willing yet to pull away. It climbs up his arm, questioning, exploratory, warm. 

“I _said_ , _‘No!’_ ”

The light extinguishes. The Master’s face contorts. The Doctor, frowning, withdraws his wet fingers, holds them up between them. They’re glistening, deep red; the wound is a mess now, as it should be. His eyes are dark. 

“Stop it. You’ve made your point. I don’t want to hurt you any more.”

The Master laughs, though it must wrack him like a spasm. 

“Of course,” he says, “you want to _hurt_ me. And I’ll make you. Like I made Lucy. You’re weak, like Lucy. You’ll do anything.”

Anything to staunch your own pain.

The Doctor stares. Does the picture pause? It’s such a long, stopped waiting that one begins to wonder.

“All right, fine. Fine, then: you do win. All right?” 

He splays his hand across the Master’s abdomen, fingers over his ribs, painting them. He compresses his hand to squeeze the soft, pierced part of him. Applies pressure. Imagines rupturing the walls that bulwark the Master’s life. 

The Master groans; a long, low sound, different from before. The regeneration energy that escapes him is more of a leaking than a leaping, a release more than a blaze. It seeps through the Doctor’s tight grasp, making it look like he’s trying to hold it inside the Master, rather than the opposite and the truth, which is that he’s trying to wring it out of him. 

“...Doctor—” 

“Don’t.”

Who was it that tried to coax him away? Which of them had breached the excruciating privacy of that moment to remind him that they existed, that there was a Jack, there was a Martha, there were Martha’s family, and everyone else, too, that only just recently, their world had saved him? Who would have gasped and stepped in and objected to see the Master in torment on the blood-soaked deck of his own ship, writhing at the Doctor’s hand? 

It had been a haze, then; it hadn’t mattered. In retrospect, the answer isn't surprising. 

Visible to the camera but not, at the time, to the Doctor, the Master’s hands, cuffed together behind him wrenched and helpless, clench and unclench, still fighting, his wrists twisting against the metal, which is picking up heat, growing hot, tight, searing. His sleeves singe. Wood scorches. The Master’s Time Lord struggle etches itself into the materials of his human costume.

Watching this, a later Doctor can’t remember the feeling of the Master’s body seizing in his arms, the Master’s shoulders spraining in their restraints against his thigh. Watching this, for the Doctor, the thought is only as real as the record, absent the certainty of embodied memory. 

But then, this timeline never happened, did it? There’s nothing to remember.

This footage doesn’t and cannot exist. The Doctor made sure of that, winding time a little more tightly back onto the reel. Everything—almost everything—had been possible for him then, powered by the gift of an entire planet.

The Doctor on the screen strokes the Master’s body. He trails his touch through the Master’s wound, now a wellspring, a headwater, from which burbles the light that, as it travels along his body, draws more light to it until the stream is a flood, rising to fill him, to overflow from him, pale and bright and gathering speed in the channels of his being. 

The light, at last, reaches escape velocity. The light discards its physical origin. It’s the light, the light that wins, blinding, burning, so fierce the Doctor thinks he’s been consumed. 

And it's good. 

Still, the Master resists it. The remaking is changing him, his bones, his skull, his skin, and he is refusing it, he’s willing his body to obey, and in response to these stresses his body is buckling, distorting, deforming, he’s opened his mouth, and his mouth and his throat and his lungs are making a sound, and the sound could be called screaming, but it isn’t anything like screaming, and the Doctor is doing this to him. The Doctor needs him, the Doctor is feeding the energy back into itself, into him, using his hands as a pipeline, a red-hot conduit, a shovel, stoking it into inexorable, choking fury. All he can see is the universe he had imagined, the Master in it, by his side, and that universe is so close; he could reach it, he could have it, he just needs to persist, he just needs to hold fast.

Then, the light is done. 

The tape, by this point, has been taxed beyond its ability. Even the Doctor had had to blink the afterimage dark out of his eyes. 

His vision had returned abruptly. He saw that the regeneration had worked. He saw what was at once undeniable and incomprehensible. The Master’s form was like a mask, the chilling and ambiguous sort of mask that could express more than one thing in a fixed face, and also like a transmat accident. Like a cloister nightmare. Caught between two states, temporally diprosopic but recognisable, horribly, _known_ , equally familiar as he had been as he would be, a Time Lord stuck mid-regeneration. 

Breathing, yes, but…

Someone was weeping. Someone was moaning. Someone’s distressed rasping seemed to fill every available silence.

The Doctor had looked up, around, not at anyone in particular. 

The words, somehow, found their way to sound.

“I’m sorry.”

But the visceral awfulness of it, of seeing and touching and holding that nightmare is inaccessible to the Doctor now. The horror is a footnote, a memorandum. New bodies, new limbic systems. Same remorse.

He had rewound the timeline with the power he’d been lent. Started again at the crack of the gun, felt more than heard, at the shock and the image of the Master stumbling back, away, falling; ran to catch him, held him, just as desperate to keep him this time, every time; it was never going to feel any less bitter, any less bad. 

But he’d stayed his hand, held himself to the helplessness and the anguish and frustration, and let the Master win, let him have his way. He'd thought that way was permanent. He'd thought he was killing the Master, letting the Master die, rather than survive as the forced regeneration had left him. 

He'd huddled over the Master's body on the bloodless deck of the Valiant and given himself to the too-long sobbing, forgetting—until he needed to remember—that he'd chosen to feel this pain. 

He hadn't known then how many chances were still to come to make the mistake again. 

This revisit is a reminder: of a disastrous act, rewritten once. Next time, there will not be a borrowed human miracle to fix it. _Next time, you won’t be a god_. 

The Doctor ejects the videocassette. It seems inadequate, this chunky casing with its one transparent window and its brittle hinge, when it has such a lot to protect. It would be so easy to expose the tape inside, throw it into the swimming pool, and never have to see its contents again. It would be easy to crush the plastic cartridge entirely, and with it, the memory, the warning, the self the Doctor doesn't want to admit to being. 

These are hands—always, each pair, every time—that are more than capable of it.


End file.
